I Have Forty Ships- Rhew (NC) 1922 Brown G
[From: The Brown Collection of NC Folklore, Volume 2, 1952. Their notes follow.
R. Matteson 2013]
40. James Harris (The Daemon Lover)
(Child 243)
If the various traditional versions of this ballad all go back, as Child believed, to the long-winded, pedestrian seventeenth-century broadside of 'James Harris,' they constitute something of an argument for Barry's doctrine of communal re-creation. For its range as traditional song, see BSM 79, and add New Hampshire (NGMS 95-7), Tennessee (SFLQ xi 127-8), North Carolina (FSRA 38-40), Florida (SFLQ viii 160-1), the Ozarks (OFS I 166-76), Ohio (BSO 70-7), Indiana (BSI 136-48, JAFL lvii 14-15), Illinois (JAFL LX 131-2), Michigan (BSSM 54-8), and Wisconsin (JAFL LIT 46-7, originally from Kentucky). Few regional collections made in this country fail to record it ; [1] it is therefore surprising that Child knew, apparently, only one American text and that a fragment. It is almost always called in America 'The House Carpenter.' The notion that the lover from the sea is a revenant or a demon, present in the original broadside and less definitely in some of the other versions in Child, has faded from most American texts; with us it is a merely domestic tragedy. And perhaps for that very reason it is one of the favorites of American ballad singers. There are some fourteen texts in the North Carolina collection, most of them holding pretty closely to one version. A full text of this version is given first and most of the others described by reference to this.
Footnote for above:
1. There are traces of it in our K and M versions.
G. 'I Have Forty Ships.' Secured by Miss Mamie Mansfield in 1922 from Estella Rhew at the Fowler School, Durham. Here the text has shrunk to five stanzas.
I 'I have forty ships on the ocean side
And they are all making for land.
If you'll come along and go with me
I'll make you a nice young man.' [1]
2 She picked up the poor little baby
And kissed him one, two, three;
Said, 'You stay here with daddy
And keep him company for me.'
3 She had not been gone but about two weeks,
I am sure it was not three,
Before that little girl began to cry and moan
For someone she'd never more see.
4 'Are you weeping for your land?
Are you weeping for your store?'
She said, 'I'm weeping for my lonesome babe
I'll never see no more.'
5 She had not been gone but about three weeks,
I am sure it was not four,
Before that ship sprung a leak
And sunk to rise no more.
Footnote for this version:
1. Miss Mansfield's text exists in the collection in two copies. The other copy reads here "I'll make you nice and grand."